Looking at Old Photographs: Investigating the Recollections That Novices and Teachers Bring with Them.

Mead, J. V.

This paper analyzes interviews with preservice, novice, and inservice teachers on their recollections of elementary or secondary teachers from their student days who served as either positive or negative role models. The interviewees described events in which they were student participant observers, providing a perspective which captures ideas, behaviors, and contexts of particular teaching acts. The paper looks at the nature of these projections as informants report them in the form of recall of their school experiences. The relationship between these recollections of former teachers and the constructs of teaching the informants appeared to hold are examined. In the analyses of the unconscious mentors, the model teachers are described and a summary is given of the qualities they demonstrated. The first part of the paper reports the detailed findings on the positive and negative models cited, focusing on the reasons given by the informants for choosing them. Comments are made on the qualities of the model the informants chose to report and some sequences and patterns that appear from the reports. The last section briefly describes the role of self-conceptions of teaching, dealing with why the informants wished to enter teaching. (JD)